David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Review: Joker)
Note: Nosh 171 will appear on Friday, Oct. 25.
Joker
Starring in You
Were Never Really Here, Inherent Vice, Walk the Line, Her and The Master has lifted Joaquin Phoenix
into the pantheon of Most Daring Actors (Christian Bale, Tim Roth and Gary
Oldman are rivals, with Nicolas Cage sadly orbiting some pulp asteroid of
career abuse). Phoenix fascinates even in a campy grinder like Joker.
Morphing into cruel Jokerness, his little mime ballet to cello music
is, well, special. Beginning in 1940 in the DC Comics Batman series, the
grinning night crawler remains a fab freak-out for millions. Jack Nicholson
ego-ramped his larking Joker in 1989’s Batman.
Heath Ledger delivered neo-Brando psychodrama in 2008’s The Dark Knight, capped after death by
an Oscar (still, the prince of posthumous is James Dean, nominated for East of Eden and Giant).
Set during the 17-day New York City garbage strike of
1981, Joker snorts a Golden Age of
Stench. In Gotham’s prime of grime and stain of shame one of the low slugs is
Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), future Joker, his demento calling card a feral cackle.
Arthur is a street clown who waves promo boards, and the movie is a graffiti
mural for films of that era. So it’s back to 1979 for Walter Hill’s stylized The Warriors (gangs, graffiti, dirty
subways), and forward to 1982 for Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Arthur, a futile, wannabe club comic, festers
with love/hate for a talk show host, who is Robert De Niro revising the TV idol
(Jerry Lewis) pestered by De Niro’s nerdy Pupkin in King. Add the paranoia fevers of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Arthur gets a gun, crazy-talks to himself, and
stalks a politician as did De Niro’s Travis Bickle (the pol’s son is Bruce
Wayne, future Batman).
The movie’s hoarding of those sources and old musical
chestnuts (Sinatra, the Ink Spots, Jimmy Durante’s Smile) never attains the sizzling fervency of urban disorder that
Hill and Scorsese did. Arthur reveals no special powers, neither does director
Todd Phillips (Starsky & Hutch,
three Hangover yucks). Phillips, who
let his design team go retro-gonzo, probably hoped that Phoenix (who lost
weight and looks tortured inside and out) could bind the show together. As an
added glaze, extra oomph of ooze, Arthur is a kind of Norman Bates to his
dying, guilty mother (Frances Conroy). He “courts” a single mom (Zazie Beetz)
who absurdly responds to his creepy overtures. Spiced with mentions of
addiction, abuse and pedophilia, this pasta of pillage was a prize winner at
the Venice festival. The DC thrills and chills are more like a wheezing CB
ride (as in Charles Bronson and his crappy Death
Wish pictures).
Phoenix, whose primal ancestor here is Conrad Veidt in 1928’s The Man Who Laughs, has some gargoyle charisma steeped in self-pity, but his nuances seldom find traction in the slurry of flippant derivations. Over-hyped in style, over-debated by media, this is a pop culture mortuary, a fossil deposit of kitsch nostalgia. Arthur’s celebrity breakout comes on De Niro’s program, which launches his violent Joker nihilism. Rising bloody but grinning from a pietá pose, he is hailed by clown-masked rioters. How much further franchising can there be from such exhausted premises?
SALAD (A List)
Ten Good Crypto-Toon Movies from Comics
With main star, director and year:
The Life and
Death of Col. Blimp (Roger Livesey,
Michael Powell, 1943), The Addams Family
(Anjelica Huston, Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991), American
Splendor (Paul Giamatti, Shari Springer Berman, 2003), Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire, Sam Raimi, 2002), Batman (Jack Nicholson, Tim Burton, 1989), Popeye (Robin Williams, Robert Altman, 1980), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, Patty Jenkins, 2017), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Bob Hoskins, Robert Zemeckis, 1988), Superman (Christopher Reeve, Richard
Donner, 1978) and Men in Black (Will
Smith, Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
John
Ford welcomed Orson Welles to Hollywood in 1939, and while prepping Citizen Kane Welles studied Ford’s Stagecoach religiously. But when,
decades later, Peter Bogdanovich put a vintage Ford on his home screen, Orson
couldn’t help himself: “During the first reel I said, ‘Isn’t it funny how
incapable even Ford was of making women look in-period?’ You can always tell
which decade a costume picture was made in, even if it’s supposed to be in the
17th century. ‘Look at those two girls in the covered wagon. Their
hairdos and costumes are really what the actresses in the ’50s thought was good
taste. Otherwise, they’re gonna say ‘I won’t come out in this.’ Peter flew into
a rage, turned off the projector and wouldn’t let us see the rest of the movie
because I didn’t have enough respect for Ford! But Jack made some of the best
ever.” (From the Welles/Henry Jaglom My
Lunches with Orson.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The
halting, difficult bonding of Tex-stud Ron (Matthew McConaughey) and drag queen
Ray/Rayon (Jared Leto) is the binary core fused by AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club: “Leto’s ‘I don’t wanna die’ is the most moving
I’ve ever heard on film, his performance as humanely graceful and open-hearted
as Bruce Davison’s in Longtime Companion.
Ray’s ending in a hospital cuts to Ron in Mexico (buying drugs). There in a
drug-med lab he walks in wonder among thousands of golden butterflies, used for
thcir hormones. The poetic juxtaposition feels absolutely right, for Dallas is about a man dying, but also
about a man emerging like a butterfly from a cocoon – turning from a crudely
barricaded personality into a caring, missionary person, in one of the toughest
critiques of machismo ever filmed.” (Both actors won Oscars. From the
McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club
chapter of my book Starlight Rising,
available from Kindle, Nook and Amazon.)
DESSERT (Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Matthew
McConaughey and Jared Leto put themselves through the mortal mill, and both won
Oscars for starring in Dallas Buyers Club
(Focus Features 2013; director Jean-Marc Valée, d.p. Yves Bélanger).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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